If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in journalism, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #46 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual reviewed 4 schools in Arkansas to determine which ones were the best for bachelor's degree seekers in the field of journalism. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 186 bachelor's degrees in journalism during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great Journalism School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of journalism for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality journalism program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to journalism students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other journalism students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt journalism students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized journalism related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for journalism students working on their bachelor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Journalism Bachelor's Degree Schools in Arkansas list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Journalism in Arkansas
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in journalism.
Top Arkansas Schools for a Bachelor's in Journalism
University of Arkansas is a great decision for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in journalism. UARK is a very large public university located in the city of Fayetteville.
Those journalism students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Arkansas receive $5,927 more than the typical journalism graduate.
University of Central Arkansas is a wonderful decision for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in journalism. Located in the small city of Conway, UCA is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Soon after graduation, journalism bachelor's recipients generally make an average of $31,911 at the beginning of their careers.
It's hard to beat Arkansas Tech University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in journalism. Located in the remote town of Russellville, ATU is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the journalism program state that they receive average early career wages of $32,183.
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in journalism. UAPB is a small public university located in the town of Pine Bluff.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the journalism program make an average of $27,259 in the first couple years of working.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).